Foxmarks

Creating a local bookmark in Firefox takes no more effort than pressing Ctrl + D, or possibly arranging them into a suitable directory hierarchy and perform some url cleanup if you are insane like me. This process unfolds endlessly as time goes by resulting in a huge list which acts like some kind of signature of your geek life style. Unfortunately though you're not always at home and your precious bookmarks end up fragmented between several computers. Many times you find something interesting while trying to solve something at your work place or while using your girl's box. Social bookmarking or otherwise ad hoc solutions like exporting/importing bookmarks into a shareable html file could partially address this issue however there's a more elegant route.

The answer came from another geek friend of mine and it's called Foxmarks, a Firefox plugin which works in a seamless way in the background. Everything you need to do is to install this plugin in every computer you use. During the installation you must provide a valid username and password which you can get after signing up for an account at the Foxmarks website. Once the install wizard has finished and you have restarted Firefox your bookmarks will be periodically synchronized with your Foxmarks account and every Firefox in which you're running this plugin.

That's right, no more worries about bookmark fragmentation. Though you still create a bookmark at a particular computer like before, Foxmarks will now synchronize them making sure all other computers have the same links available in Firefox as if you also created them there. Deleting a bookmark in a particular computer will also delete it on the remaining ones. Thus you effectively get a centralized way to keep your favorite links by means of a simple plugin that propagates your changes transparently without any manual intervention, unless of course you disable automatic synchronization in the preferences and choose yourself when to commit any local changes. It's worth noting this approach resembles CVS. As a positive side effect whenever you perform a system reinstall backing up your lovely bookmarks won't be a requirement anymore since they'll be already mirrored at all your other computers and at the Foxmarks website itself. Moreover you get the chance to share them with other Foxmarks users if you wish to do so, which leads us back into the social bookmarking topic yet again, something that I will discuss here in the future.

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